Alive Plugin Synchronization

As anima® Designer is an external standalone application without render capabilities, the user must import the 3D environments that need to be populated and then bring back the simulations made with anima® into the main 3D app.

This back-and-forth process takes time, resources, and it is prone to the errors typically associated with the import/export processes (issues like unit consideration, object exportability, compatible file formats availability, etc). But above all that, it forces anima® to rely on external exporters along with its own bugs and issues that we don’t have the chance to fix. We decided to create alive™ to solve all those issues.

Alive™ uses an innovative technology that establishes a direct link between your 3D application and anima® allowing a smooth and seamless workflow. With it, you can focus on the work at hand, refining your animations progressively as many times as you want, without taking care of any kind of export/import process because alive™ takes care of everything automagically.

The alive™ technology uses an advanced IPC connection between anima® and its plugins (3dsMax®, Cinema 4D®, and Maya®) to enable its new and highly efficient back-and-forth workflow.

Using alive™ you can synchronize:

• Scenes: As soon as you save your scene in anima®, alive™ will update the scene in your 3D app.
• Collision Backgrounds: Select a list of objects from your 3D scene and send them to anima® with one single click.
• Cameras: Visualize the scene directly inside anima® from the same cameras that you have in your 3D app (static and animated), updated in real-time!

One more thing that is possible thanks to alive™ is the anima® Drop panel. This panel is accessed directly from the 3D application and it enables access to all the non-simulated types of actors (4D people, Posed, and Ambient), so you can drop them into your 3D scene directly, without even opening anima® Designer.

Until now, you had to export and import several times while working on an anima® project. Every time you had to update a geometry used as Collision Background in anima®, you had to export a new FBX from your 3D application and import it again in anima®. And this is something that actually happens several times in the development of a project for multiple reasons. Furthermore,  it can represent a considerable slice of the artist’s time and also a considerable extra disk space to manage all the different versions for each update, especially in big projects.

That is one of the main reasons why we developed the alive™ technology, to achieve an easier and more efficient artist workflow. Let’s see now how this connection works.

The first step to start an alive™ connection is to open anima® and your 3D application. If we only have one of both applications opened (either anima® or 3dsMax® / Cinema4D® / Maya®), the alive™ connection will stay disabled (see state A in the image).

After that, as soon as we have any project loaded in anima® or in the 3D app, the alive™ button can change to the following states:

• Connected, not synchronized (state B)
  You’ll enter in this state if either you have still not loaded any anima® project into 3dsMax, or if you have loaded different anima® projects in both applications.
• Already synchronized (state C)
  You’ll enter in this state if you have loaded anima® scenes from the same project. If the scenes loaded are the same in both projects you’ll get the first alive™ icon (vivid yellow with no animation). If the scenes loaded are exactly the same in both applications then you’ll get the second alive™ icon (vivid yellow with a flicker animation in the arrows).

Once alive™ is connected (states B and C) the alive™ button is enabled. Let’s see what happens when you push that button in each state.

Sync from state B: Connected, not synchronized

• anima® -> 3dsMax® / Cinema4D® / Maya®

The most common way to get to this state is when you have already created and loaded the population project you will work on into anima® and then you want to send this project the scene that you have loaded into the 3D app. To do that you simply push the alive™ button (when you hover it will change from the first icon to the second one).

Then anima® will ask you to confirm the synchronization:

And when you click YES, alive™ will tell the plugin to load the same scene that is already loaded in anima®. This scene will be loaded into 3dsMax following the import process that you already know, but this time alive™ will spare you the tedious process of going to Menu>Import and searching the anima® scene path, and you’ll only have to confirm the material preset that you want to use.

• 3dsMax® / Cinema4D® / Maya® -> anima®

But, what if you have a scene in your 3D app with an already imported anima® scene, and what you really want is to load this scene into the anima® application? No problem, we got you covered! In this state, you can also establish the connection the other way around, from 3dsMax to anima®.

Every time that you load an anima® scene into your 3D app with the anima® application open, it will ask if you want to load also there the scene from your 3D app, with a message similar to this one:

If you click YES, then the project and the scenes that were already loaded into the 3D app will be loaded now also into the anima® Designer application.

Sometimes it may happen that this message is shown at an inappropriate moment, for example, if you have been editing another scene and you still have not saved the changes. In this case, you can simply cancel the connection temporally (click X), save the scene where you were working, and then make alive™ to ask you again that same question. To do that you can go to the alive™ connection panel in the plugin and click the Sync project button:

You are in this state when you already have some scenes from the same anima® project already open in the anima® application and in the plugin.

If you already have the same scenes loaded in both applications then you don’t need to do anything more, you’re already completely synchronized. The alive™ button will be the first one (bright static yellow) and this message will appear if you click it:

But if you have loaded different scenes from the same project or even a different amount of scenes into either anima® or the plugin, then you’ll see the second alive™ icon (bright yellow with a flicker animation in the arrows), and when you press it anima® will ask you in which direction you want to synchronize the connection.

Then just select the direction you want in the drop-down menu, click SYNC, and after a few seconds both applications will have the same scenes loaded and you’ll be completely synchronized.

Although this workflow has been designed to update the scenes automatically, and the sync process is fairly quick, in some cases the user might find annoying the delay introduced by the synch process. This might happen, for example, when working with very big anima® scenes with thousands of actors.

For that reason, it is also possible to disable the automatic synchronization of alive™ and force it to be triggered manually, whenever the user needs it to happen. This can be done by unchecking the first option of the alive™ dropdown “Send updates automatically“.

With that option disabled, the synchronization will only happen whenever the user clicks on the alive™ button.

Take a look at the video below to see the differences between the standard automatic and the alternative manual update process.

Once you have enabled the alive™ connection between the anima® and your plugin, you’ll be able to define and select the collision geometries for your simulation directly inside your 3D app and send them to anima® within a click!

Now you can use alive™ to keep static and animated cameras synchronized between 3dsMax® / Cinema4D® / Maya® and anima® to perfectly control your crowd simulations and character placement.

You only need to enable the alive™ connection between the anima® and the plugin and all the modifications made to the cameras in the host 3D application will be instantly sent to anima®.

In this video, you will be able to see a real Use Case where anima® and the new alive™ workflow are used to add 3d people to an exterior architecture project. The complete workflow is shown, starting with an initial sketch, the set up of the model in 3ds max to use it as a background collision reference, the addition of 3d people, the rendering process, and even the final tuning of the actors in postproduction.